“Oh, do not trouble yourself because you are weak with weariness and have no place to sit down but the dust in the hot sun. This is heavenly to what you will find later on.”
I heard her tell Camela and Concetta this, and the effect was anything but cheering on them. Antonio tried to comfort them, but he was almost at his wits’ end, answering questions from all the members of our party as to when they were going to get something to eat, whether we were to go at once on the steamer, whether or not they looked “sick in the eyes,” and might they open one of the trunks to get a bottle of wine, and so on indefinitely.
The begging friars were nearly all Franciscans, and moved about the various enclosures among the thousands of emigrants, telling them that they could best ward off the fearful dangers of the voyage and in the new, wild land, America, by purchasing prayer-cards. They got a great deal of money in this way.
It was with keen disappointment that I saw a party of three persons, an old woman, her daughter and the daughter’s small boy, who were going by the Citta di Napoli, brought off the Reina Margherita and hurried away with the other Veloce people. I had observed their diseased eyes the evening before, and had warned all of our party to keep away from them; but the young woman had made friends with one of our neighbors, to whom she confided the fact that this was her third trip to Naples with her mother and her boy. She had tried twice before to go to America, but all had been turned down on account of trachoma, and sent back to Messina, where they lived. Now, by arranging to perform that indefinite process I heard so much about, “Pay some money to some people,” she fully expected to get through at Naples and to be landed in New York. I had planned to check up every step of her process and see if she really did get through with the old woman and the child; but now she was hustled away, and we were left standing helpless. I had the name she gave to our neighbor, and the address in Messina, but either the neighbor was mistaken or the name fictitious.
Soon after they had gone, an old man with a swarm of young clerks appeared, and, calling the roll of the party, issued tickets which were good for daily rations, while we were held in Naples, at the North German Lloyd’s contract restaurant, the Trattoria Retifilero in Via Lanzieri. It was a long, tedious process, involving much argument and searching for passports, tickets and papers.
When the old man was finished, he and his henchmen marshaled the crowd, divided it off into groups amid a wild uproar, and each group of thirty or forty followed one of the young clerks into the Capitaneria, where they were led before the city customs officials, who ransacked their baggage for comestibles. A number of the members of our party were intensely agitated over the performance, it being their first experience, and little Nastasia, who had wine and cheese in his box, was wild with fright. He was afraid he would be arrested, or something would happen that would prevent his going.
A few times before, I had seen evidences of this fear among others of our party, and I soon realized that what makes the emigrant so meek in the face of outrageous brutalities, so open to the wiles of sharpers, so thoroughly disconcerted and bewildered in the face of an examination, is his terrible dread of not being allowed to enter America. He would as soon think of cutting off a hand as doing anything that “would get him into trouble.”
When the city customs officials were finished with us, we were passed through to the front of the Capitaneria, and to the left, where the steamship broker’s representatives were busy checking the heavy baggage. Almost the entire party was dependent on Antonio and me to worry the score of big trunks, boxes and bundles through, and, this spot being just as hot and dusty as the other side of the Capitaneria, the whole party was in a deplorable condition when at last we were ready to be led to our abiding-place for the two nights we would be in Naples.
Once outside the iron fence bounding the Capitaneria, the group largely made up of our party straggled along under the weight of their baggage, following the young clerk who piloted us along the Marina, with its turmoil of commerce, and soon we turned into the Vico di via Porta. Threading our way through the narrow street, jammed with all the life of the lower classes, we came at last to the Albergo della Rosa, or Rose Hotel, in the Lanzieri.
It is one of the many houses whose great source of income is the housing of emigrants at fixed rates of from one to two lire per night. The first floor was occupied by shops; around the entrance were gathered carts loaded with all sorts of wares from vegetables to trumpery combs, mirrors, soaps, baggage-straps,—in fact, all of the things which the poor emigrant could be led to fancy he wanted for the voyage. The house did not look very inviting, and as we hesitated a horde of runners from other houses pounced upon us and almost dragged us elsewhere. Some of our people would have gone if a respectable old gentleman passing by and hearing the commotion had not stopped and addressed us, saying, “Go to this hotel if the company sends you here, and do not take up with these thieves. Some of the places they recommend are of a most dangerous character. Emigrants are robbed there constantly.”